My Wild, Wild Weekend

It’s that time of the semester again—so close to the finish line, if only that stupor-inducing stack of portfolios and exams and theses would magically get out of the way (no offense to my thesis advisees, whose work I love and would love so much more once all the kinks are ironed out, hopefully by the end of this week). Nothing like the prospect of grading papers to make any other task appealing, nay urgent, demanding attention right this minute and not any minute later. Which is why this weekend was spent 1) traveling to that distant land called Makati to hunt for books, a trip well worth the trouble since it yielded, among other things, the latest David Shields and the latest Lydia Davis (can’t wait to get my hands on this by Davis, which apparently is going to be out this year!), 2) fantasizing about what to teach next semester, which, if I get to teach nonfiction, will definitely include the latest Shields, a perfect companion to one of my favorite anthologies, mixed reviews notwithstanding, for its ideas on, among other things, collage (/mash-up/remix), appropriation (/collaboration/plagiarism/cut-up), genre, and the contentious collisions of copyright concerns and creativity (fun to think about in light of the brouhaha involving that Berlin wonderchild-author or plagiarist, depending on where you’re coming from and in light of my own recent revisiting of The Waste Land, whose end notes are very much like Shields’ works cited—elephantiastic and obsessive and cryptic (and apparently, at least according to Shields’ publisher’s lawyers, the absolutely right thing to do), 3) scanning and organizing my files, always a pleasure because, thanks to my bad memory, I always stumble upon amazing things to read and watch and listen to that I forgot I had (courtesy of artsy friends who are also eager beavers when it comes to spreading the artsy wealth), and also always bittersweet, thanks to photos which are always bittersweet no matter how sweet (this latest viewing revealing to me that my life may change but my wardrobe will remain, literally remain, as apparently I haven’t changed my clothes much in the last five, ten years, the few additions mostly courtesy of high school friends who actually bother to give me clothes for Christmas), and 4) attempting to turn the apartment into a cat fur-free household, however temporarily, through meticulous scraping, scrubbing, and sweeping, a futile task, I know, especially in light of this horrendously hot weather which has turned my feline friend into a monstrous fur-shedding machine.